One of the best pieces of advice I received during my collegiate abroad study was from my program advisor. As college students serving as interns in the entertainment industry, she warned us that we might experience some bottom feeder treatment, and harsh criticism and possibly even low-brow requests from superiors. “Know what triggers you, and also know what UN-triggers you.”
During this time, I learned a myriad of different things that trigger me. I’ll always be grateful for my experiences out there though, because having them taught me how to un-trigger myself. Over time, I’ve learned that taking a bath and lighting a candle helps, but that having a place set aside for just me within my own mind is vital. Actually, I created several, and used this method to help un-trigger myself through essentially every situation that could possibly resurrect difficult emotions.
Through meditation and intentional visualization practice, you can consciously reprogram the subconscious mind. Without you even knowing it, using tools like these will alter your brains responses to your triggers. I suggest meditation to anyone everyone I know. It pains me when people say they can’t meditate, or “can't focus” on meditating. They don’t feel like they’re really doing anything. It only creates more frustration and anxiety because they think they can’t meditate like a “normal” person.
If you resonate with this, here’s the thing. You don’t have to be a monk sitting on a goddamn lilly pad to get something out of meditation. The only rule to meditating is to not judge anything about it. If you’re “mediating” and your internal dialogue pissing and moaning that you are doing it wrong, shut that down. There is no wrong or right way to meditate. The best way to start mediating is by holding yourself to stop judging the “quality” of which you think you can do it. Just breathe. Listen to a guided meditation on YouTube. Nothing about meditation is supposed to be perfect. Just listen and observe the thinking, and see what it shows you.
Second, some people view meditating as unproductive. At first especially, it doesn’t really seem to serve an instantaneously gratifying resolve to anxiety. This is because as humans functioning as a part of this society, we tend to turn outside to resolve it or distract from it. Meditation is one of those things that you can’t necessarily see working, but its effects will add up, and materialize in your life. You just have to be consistent with it.
The discomfort of going inward to resolve anxiety steers a lot of people away from meditation. Meditating has no physical form in the moment, it’s entirely concerned with energy. I resonated with this too, especially when I started. My advice to people who don’t understand what meditation does is to familiarize yourself and think more metaphorically about yourself as a live human being. All you are, really, is an every changing energy field of which your emotions create. When you meditate, you intentionally change brain waves ~composed of energy~ which alters your internal state. That leads to you altering your internal dialogue. And that will change how you show up and present to the world. It allows you to have more control over those kinds of things. It teaches your brain how to tolerate emotional distress, possibly shorten the amount of time you focus on that distress, and harness your emotional fluctuations so that you can use them to your benefit.
My relationship with meditating is a very positive, cyclical relationship. Meditating has made me so much more self aware that I know what to visualize to redirect my energy field for any given emotion or situation. Everyone has different triggers. All of our triggers originate from our emotions, which is why using visualization is so powerful in altering your state of being.
Using meditation instead of something external to distract from anxiety forces you to develop a better understanding of how your internal dialogue shifts as a result of external circumstances. Without fail, knowing yourself allows you to trust yourself, and you can increase your confidence if you know that you always have something in your back pocket to help you endure life. Developing visualization zones can put you in the energy of the opposite emotion that is creating stress = redirection. You create for yourself an antidote to X negative state. In my experience, everything any outcome I create, good or bad, starts and ends in the mind.
Examples of visualizations:
1) “Babygirl”
We’re at a place in space that I derived from the show the O.A. It’s symmetric and crystalline all around and kind of like if you were to be walking on top of a mirage in outer space. This is my self compassion place. It also helps whenever I’m being critical of myself about anything. Along the way, I somehow trained myself to distrust my own intuition. I would imagine the version of myself that needed to change, and imagine the version of myself that I am capable of being and becoming, aka my higher/highest self. I would, as my highest self, hug myself as what I imagined as the current one I embodied. I visualized giving myself love, and comforted myself. “It’s okay, babygirl.” Speaking to yourself as though you are an external nurturing figure in your life allows you to reparent, a lot of people could use that.
2) The Forest
I imagine a forest around me that is rather quiet. There’s a little opening on a non-threatening cliff where I sit overlooking a body of water. There’s a waterfall in the right hand corner of the pond/lake, and from under it a boat emerges. I can see the boat, from the perspective I sit at, I can know where its going, I know what is doing, and because I am removed from it and not on it, I can see it clearly. Whenever a certain situation knocks me out of balance, this one usually helps me straighten out. For instance, I often get knocked out of balance when I get out of my routine, or there is a situation in my life that I feel I don’t have enough control over the outcome.
Side note: this is really interesting and I think it parallels - I find that I get a better nights sleep when I charge my phone on the floor (below me) instead of putting it level with my body at night.
3) The Cleanser
I imagine a crystal clear pool of water with sunlight creating the ebb and flow pattern that water does. Or even ocean water from a tropical place. It’s like it refreshes my energy like a shower cleanses your body. This works for a couple things.
This is a hugely helpful one when I feel stagnant or bored and feel compelled to go buy something to alleviate that emotion or change something about my external environment. It also works well to clear out the negativity energy of someone else or of a situation, and sends you back to clear-minded state.It works also for when you had a hard conversation in some part of your physical environment which you cannot remove yourself from all the time. Its like sage for your mind. It separates you from the energy that still exists in the space.
…. to name a few. Hope this helps someone out there :)